HISTORY AND SOCIOLOGY

by Franz Oppenheimer

in: William Fielding Ogburn, Alexander
Goldenweiser, The Social Sciences and their Interrelations,
Cambridge 1927, pp.
221-234.

[p. 221]
Between sociologists and historians there has existed since the
first inception of sociological ideas, even since the time of
Condorcet, a sharp difference, a state of battle, which grows out
of two different sources - a psychological and a
scientifico-logical.

The psychological difference is based on the fact that all the
older writing of history viewed and evaluated events from the
standpoint of the upper class. It was, as soon as it had grown
out of the embryonic stage of writing mere annals or chronicles,
of three kinds: first, court historiography, with the clearly set
task of glorifying the deeds and creations of the ruler; or
secondly, it was clerical philosophy of history, which explained
events from the standpoint of the ruling church as the carrying
out of a divine plan of salvation, and was for this reason
necessarily quietistic, conservative, anti-revolutionary; or
finally, it was history-writing of the third estate, which had
either already gained control of its state or was at least
preparing to do so, and if it had not already attained to
complete victory politically, at least it already possessed
sufficient economic means to want political control and to be
able to force it in the not too distant future. On the other
hand, the first representatives of sociological thought viewed
things as socialists from below, and this attitude has
never been entirely lost by their successors, as for example
Comte, who had primarily bourgeois tendencies.

Closely connected with this psychological difference is the
scientifico-logical. All older history-writing had thrust the
strong individual, the hero, into the center of the story,
had conceived him as the real motive power of the events: the
court historiographic method did this as a matter of course; the
clerico-ecclesiastical conception did it, with the difference,
however, that it regarded rulers, lawgivers, and the like, as
instruments of God; and the bourgeois writing of history, in line
with its general individualism, did it by abandoning the idea of
a "genius" come from God and conceiving [p. 222]
instead "genius" as eminent personal endowment. In
contrast with this, the sociological conception, for the very
reason that it viewed things from below, represented the
masses as the real bearers of historical events. This is
collectivistic; the older history-writing was individualistic.

This is a difference, moreover, which does not stop at the
surface of things: it leads to the deepest depths. A science of
history aimed essentially at the individual cannot possibly
conceive the notion of seeking the laws of history (unless it be
to feel out instinctively the divine plan of salvation working
itself out in it), for there can be no law of the individual. But
sociology in its first representatives proceeded from the
philosophy of western Europe, which was oriented in mathematics
and natural science, and took its beginning in Descartes; it was
therefore as a matter of course intent on conformity to law, and
from its collectivistic standpoint could well hope to be able to
find such lawfulness. To it, then, the science of history, such
as it found in existence, naturally seemed positively
unscientific. Not only did the socialist, Condorcet, think so,
but also after him the real founder of sociology as a science,
Auguste Comte, who immediately opened the attack. Historians were
for him the thing which he scientifically most despised,
"specialists" whose banal doings would have to be
overcome by a new speciality, "the study of scientific
generalities"; the writing of history, he said, had in
aspect not lost its descriptive and narrative character to that
day and was far from being a true science, since its childish
overvaluation of genius would be impossible in a true science.
The second progenitor of the young science, Herbert Spencer, was
no more polite. He leaves to history-writing, at most,
description, saying that history is to be compared to sociology
as biography is to physiology. And similar expressions were used
by the man who first synthetically united western European
sociology with the middle European philosophy of history, Lorenz
von Stein. This critical attitude extends down to the present
day; only a short time ago a German sociologist, L. von Wiese,
remarked caustically to the pure historian, von Below, that
"since the days of Spencer there had existed among
sociologists a lively distrust as to the reliability of the
material which history supplies us."[1]

No wonder that those who had been attacked so unexpectedly and
so rudely, defended themselves. Even the demand to change [p. 223]
their course, to see things from an entirely new angle, could not
be expected to be received kindly; for always and everywhere
"the capitalists of the mind defend themselves against
expropriation." Now, however, to the antipathy for the
socialists and the anger at the disturbers of the peace was added
also resentment against the bold attackers, and the tone of the
polemics betrayed the mental attitude.

Now the young branch of knowledge, in its first systems, made
blunders enough, which enabled those already ensconced in science
to decline to recognize it at all. They said it was
"monistic in method," that it tried to handle social
philosophy with the tools of natural science, that it often
confused pure sociology, which explains causes, with social
philosophy, which refers to values, that it undertook, for
example, to derive what ought to be from what is, and that it
evinced here and there often enough a lack of the necessary
critical attitude toward its sources and of caution in its
synthesis. Comte's attempt at a scientific universal history
contained, side by side with some downright brilliant portions, a
large number of easily refutable peculiarities and undeniable
mistakes, and thus people held sociology - such is human nature -
responsible for the sins of the sociologists, threw them both
overboard, and declared the, whole undertaking a priori
unscientific and unviable. The sentence of condemnation on the
part of the Rector of the University of Brussels, Van der Reft,
is well known; even recently von Below, a good historian of the
old school, has taken the same stand and has characterized
sociology as an "omnium-gatherum science" and, with
Alfred Dove, as a "loan shop of word-masks."

The quarrel must be fought to a conclusion. For sociology, as
the theoretical science of the social process as such and
as a whole, cannot think of renouncing its right to treat the
chief and most interesting part of this process, social progress.[2] It cannot
content itself with investigating its subject only in the
cross-section, so to say, in the axis of space; in order to get
closer to its goal it must be allowed to investigate it in the
longitudinal section, in the axis of time, in order to be able to
find from the synthesis of these two considerations the law of
the whole. That was Comte's great object; [p. 224]
he consigned it to all his successors, and most of them took over
the inheritance with this charge. Spann is almost the only one
who has shunted history out of his system, and that apparently is
only for the present. (We are not speaking here of the
representatives of that tendency which already seems outworn,
which came from Simmel, but was finally given up by him as well,
which conceives sociology as a purely formal science, analogous
to logic and grammar.)

What is History?

Let us ask, then, first, what the writing of history is. Its
battle with the sociological conception of history, particularly
in the form of the so-called materialistic philosophy of history,
has forced its representatives to a consideration of their
position, task, and method, so that the problems are now stated
with some accuracy and probably admit of a decision.

Wilhelm Dilthey distinguishes first of all between the natural
sciences and the mental sciences. The former treat that which is
forever foreign to us, which comes to us from without and is
recognizable through our senses, just to what extent we do not
know; the later, however, have as their material that which is
immediately accessible and familiar to us from our own
observation - life and consciousness. In the case of the former,
we can only connect cause and result from without; in the case of
the latter, we, as a part of feeling, willing, recognizing life,
see from within into the true connection of things, and can
understand it by empathy.

The general field of the mental sciences is historical,
social, reality. They can make concerning the mental sciences
three different kinds of statement: historical, by
expressing the real that is got by perception; theoretical,
that is, constituent contents of this reality derived by
abstraction; and practical, which express judgements of
value and prescribe rules. We are interested here in the first
class. Dilthey says that the conception of the singular, the
individual, is as much a subject of science as the development of
abstract uniformities.

In this discussion we have first of all to state what is most
important for us, namely, that the social historical reality
admits besides the historical consideration also a theoretical
one that is deductive and aiming at conformity to law. But we
will not content ourselves with that; we will ask whether the
assuredly possible [p. 225]
empathetic consideration of the singular and individual can be
recognized as science? Suffice it for us here that Dilthey
has been most decisively contradicted from his own camp, that of
the defenders of the hitherto prevailing method of
history-writing: that is, what he portrayed was not science but art.
Writing history, then, is an art, a conception which not long
since a historian of the rank of Beloch expressed in no uncertain
terms.

Heinrich Rickert, the most famous logician and methodologist
of Germany, will not admit that writing history is an art, and
rightly; for as a matter of fact, that about a work of art which
is the reproduction of individual reality is esthetically
unessential. In order to save the writing of history as a
science, he distinguishes, contrary to his predecessor, materially,
between natural science and cultural science, and formally,
between the method of natural science and the historical method.
Within the scope of cultural science comes everything and every
occurrence which we lift out of the sum of reality because they
have for us a particular importance or significance, so that we
see in them more than mere nature. And whenever we investigate
such things or occurrences with regard to their separateness and
individuality rather than their existence, in so far as it is
determined by general laws, then we are making use of the
historical method (which incidentally is just as applicable to
subjects of natural science as the method of natural science is
to the subjects of cultural science).

Here, again, we wish to assert that that deduction clears even
more decidedly the way of sociology as a generalizing branch,
that is, one proceeding according to the method of natural
science, from the social, historical reality, than does Dilthey's
conception. But we will not content ourselves with that either;
we will inquire further whether Rickert succeeded in rescuing the
writing of history as a science of the individual.

This seems doubtful. Rickert, as the eminent logician that he
was, knew of course that, as Kant says, there can be no
particular without the general. We can understand only what we
can classify under general conceptions. And so, also, the writer
of history can by no means do without such general conceptions.
Even Spencer pointed out in the case of a number of historians,
among them the famous Froude and Kingsley, that they, who ex
professo deny all conformity to law in history, not only
recognize it de facto, but also make it the basis of their
discussions. Bouglé ironically and [p. 226]
strikingly calls that involuntary sociology. And just as the
historian cannot even start his work if he does not believe in a
certain conformity to law in human mass activity, he likewise
cannot proceed a step further if he does not have a system of
general conceptions. What could the historian possibly do if he
did not possess the concepts "state,"
"economics," "rule," "politics,"
"literature," "revolution,"
"people," "city," and so on?

In order to evade this difficulty, Rickert constructs for
historical work special so-called complex concepts, which are not
to be deduced by abstraction, but in some way or other probably
to be made by empathy, and which are supposed to embrace the
whole range of presentation. He names as an example the idea of
the Renaissance. It seems doubtful whether there can be such
concepts at all; whether it is not a question rather of outgrown
images, approximately what Spinoza characterized as "notiones
universales," unclarified, obscure masses of ideas, or
really only words which come in where there is a lack of ideas.
It seems to us that here, just as in the case of Dilthey, the
vivid, artistic appreciation of a personality, an individual
group, or a Zeitgeist is being confused with scientific
activity.

It cannot possibly escape a mind of the caliber of Rickert's
that, to say the least, questionable things are here being
asserted; and we shall get at the core of the problems if we
trace the way by which he reached these constructions. He says
that the historians wish to portray the ever individual reality
in its individuality; they see this as their task, and to it
logic must do justice. Otherwise the work of Ranke and all the
other famous historians would not be scientific!

The syllogistic petitio principii is obvious. That
which is to be proved is used as a premise of the proof. The real
question is whether the great historians were not mistaken when
they considered their work scientific work.

The solution must really be that the great historians were, to
be sure, great scholars, but that it is nevertheless doubtful
whether what they produced may be, or indeed has to be, called
science. In order to write history, one must possess scientific
qualities of a high order: one must at least be a great
philologist and have all the capabilities of a diplomat,
numismatist, and so forth. Eduard Meyer, who has a masterly
command not only of Latin and Greek, but also of all the Near
Eastern languages, is certainly a great scholar, as is also
Mommsen, who besides his most thorough philological training [p. 227] was
also an eminent jurist. Furthermore, the critical handling of the
assembled material calls for decided scientific ability, above
all, for acumen. But that does not prove that the product
of these scientific labors is scientific history.

Here we can still see that the writing of history had its
origin in Humanism, which was quite essentially philology, that
is, the science of language. To the rapt devotion of that
generation to antiquity, every single fact that was handed down
from the history of the Greeks and Romans seemed immensely
valuable, and it was axiomatic that the most painstaking
establishment of all those facts was a worthy goal of effort. And
that may still be uncontested from the standpoint of philology;
but for us philology is no longer history! To us it is, from the
standpoint of history-writing, nothing but one of its auxiliary
sciences, as from the standpoint of philology the writing of
history is one of its auxiliary sciences.

History-Writing as Descreptive Doctrine

What, then, has the writing of history been heretofore if it
is neither art nor science? We consider it an esthetic activity.
Leonard Nelson in his Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Critique
of Practical Reason) has shown that ethics is composed of two
parts, the doctrine of duty, which grows out of the moral
interest, and the doctrine of the ideal, which comes from the
aesthetic interest. The former gives categorical imperatives, the
latter, categorical optatives. For its prescriptions are not
hypothetical, nor yet imperative, and still they have a relation
to the will. And he shows further that every higher, that is,
non-sensual, positive value can only have its root here: for
every moral value is only negative, produces only - for undutiful
action - negative, incompensative lack of value. All the cultural
values come, then, from the aesthetic interest, which alone is
capable of giving stress to value.

In pursuance of these thoughts, we consider history-writing a descriptive
doctrine of the ideal. That fits in beautifully with the very
common idea that history should and can be the schoolmaster of
mankind - a conception which would be quite senseless if one
tried, like the representatives of history-writing, to treat it
as a science and yet denied all conformity of events to law, but
which on the other hand has good grounds if one conceives the
writing of history as a doctrine of the ideal which sets up
models to be lived up to and wishes to offer to the will
categorical optatives of heroic action. [p. 228]
And this corresponds even better with the utterances of important
historians and philosophers of history. Mehlis writes, for
example, that history has the best of intentions with regard to
its heroes. Dilthey says, "The biographer ought to view man sub
specie aeternitatis, as he himself feels at moments when
there is only a vestment and veil between himself and the
divinity, and he feels himself as near to the starry heavens as
to any part of earth." Even Goethe assigned to history the
task of "awakening enthusiasm"; Troeltsch says of
Machiavelli that he contented himself with a psychologically
viewed typification of history as a guide in present action;
Schleiermacher thinks "that history is the picture book of
moral philosophy, and moral philosophy is the formulary of
history"; and Eduard Meyer says "that all presentation
of history is not only science but art, and moreover not only in
the matter of outward form, as in the case of every work of
literature, but also as to content in shaping the object."

And what is more - and this is where the true sociological
viewpoint is expressed - history is always the doctrine of the
ideal from the standpoint of a definite group. Every
group, particularly every class (in the wider sense of the word
where it means rank and caste), reads its group idea1s into
history and brings them forward in the form of idealized
personalities, institutions, and conditions as everlasting models
and guides for present action. Or in other words, the
historian writes history "sub specie" of what he
orthodoxly considers "aeternitatis," which in
reality, however, is nothing but his "personal
equation" (Spencer): and that is his group's stock of norms
which have been instilled into him by education, imitation, and
tradition. To illustrate by a single example, a historian,
Treitschke, famous not only for his scientific achievements, in
his Politik (I, p.86) boasts of the Germans, that is, of
himself, that they are "free from political traditions and
prejudices." There is no question of his orthodoxy, and
neither can one doubt his inseverable connection with his social
group, that of Prussian conservatism with a strong big-agrarian
coloring.

In so far as they are all the expression of the personal
equation of their teachers and writers, that is, the expression
of the chance disposition of the group to which those
personalities belong, all mental and cultural sciences are not
the subjects of sociological investigation, as is assumed - they
are its objects. It is the most priceless gift which the
young discipline of sociology has yet brought [p. 229]to science and mankind, that it has caused us to
recognize this hitherto almost completely neglected viewpoint of
criticism. It demands to know the personal equation of every
investigator in one of its fields in the same way as that is
expected of the astronomer making observations; and it demands of
every critic that in the case of all older works and the recent
ones as well, he first of all determine what ideal of class or
group the author (orthodoxly) served or serves, and what, for
this reason his "thema probandum" was or is.
This psychological test opens the way in many cases for the
logical test and leads to the proton pseudos of deduction.

This new method is already being used to-day as a matter of
course, consciously or unconsciously, by all the important
representatives of the history of the mind: a pleasing result
particularly of the materialistic criticism of history, and a new
proof of the fact that even an incorrect theory, if it is only
brilliant enough, can accomplish a great deal for the advancement
of science.[3]

We will mention as one of the most important representatives
of this critical tendency Wilhelm Hasbach, who has already
handled the method with complete mastery in his classical
investigations concerning the General Philosophical Principles
of the Political Economics Founded by François Quesnay and Adam
Smith. We ourselves have consciously and on principle applied
it in all our research on the history of the dogmas of economics,
both in the case of preceding sociologists in our Allgemeine
Soziologie, and to history-writing in an extensive excursus
on the history of the Great-Men-Theory (p.911 et seq.).
A work on the state soon to appear (the second part of Das
System der Soziologie, of which hitherto the first volume, Allgemeine
Soziologie, and the third, Oekonomik, have been
available, each in two half-volumes) also treats from the same
critical viewpoint the doctrines of the state from canonical
times to the present. That this method, applied to the writing of
history, produces extremely valuable results is proved by a piece
of research, as yet only in the form of a sketch, by my pupil
Gottfried Salomon, Privatdozent at the University of Frankfort on
the Main, on "History as Ideology" (in Wirtschaft
und Gesellschaft, Festgabe für Franz Oppenheimer, 1924). He
proves here conclusively that all history-writing is the weapon
of the various clearly recognizable parties of political life;
for instance, in the Middle [p. 230]
Ages, of the papal party or that of the local rulers, or perhaps
of the imperial party; or in modern times, of the states, or of
absolutism, or of the third or fourth estates; and that the
position taken each time corresponds exactly to the interests of
the orthodoxly-represented social group.

According to that, the writing of history ceases to be the opponent
of sociology and becomes its subject of study. It serves
as an important index of the class situation, out of which grew
the individual work by virtue of the social-psychological
determinism which was an insurmountable obstacle for the
sociologically naive man.

The Sociological Method

The first task of sociological history-writing is,
accordingly, one of criticism. It has to put the generally
accepted axioms of the historians under the microscope and test
them to see if they hold good in fact, if they in fact are true.
Where the axioms of the different classes, especially of the
bourgeoisie and the prevailing Socialism, contradict one another
mutually, the task is already solved in part - the axioms are
already confuted or at least shaken. But where the two schools
solely devoted to science start from the same fundamental axiom,
there the whole work is yet to be done. One of the firmly seated
propositions of this sort is the "law of previous
accumulation," from which the whole bourgeois as well as the
whole Marxian doctrine proceeds as from an incontestably true
principle - that doctrine by virtue of which the social classes
everywhere without any interference of extra-economical force,
from merely inner, merely economic forces, have developed from a
state of original equality, and after the restoration of equality
would have to develop again from absolutely the same forces. In
other words: history has existed, to be sure, but has effected
nothing; conquest, enslavement, subjection, dominance, state, and
foreign policies have remained without effect on the present
state of humanity. On this theory alone communism sensibly rests:
if it is true, rational equality can be restored and maintained
only by the elimination of those forces of economic competition
between those unequally endowed.

I have time and again attacked this pseudo-law, and with, I
think, successful arguments have refuted it as completely false
(most recently in System der Soziologie, I, p. 987 et
seq., and III, p. 206 et seq.) without, however, thus
far being able to get a fair debate [p. 231]
from those attacked. In the second volume of Das System I
have laid bare in a detailed analysis from the standpoint of
intellectual history, the ramifications of the theorem and have
shown that it is one tangle of dogmatic metaphysical postulates
in connection with crude, even ridiculous, misunderstandings. (A
short extract has appeared in the Festschrift für Lujo
Brentano.)

After the completion of this task of criticism, which will
perhaps uncover still other principles of present-day writing of
history, just as widespread and just as false, the second and
positive task is to portray history by taking the correct
conception of the origin of the state and the classes as a basis.
An attempt of this sort is to be found in our Grossgrundeigentum
und soziale Frage (second edition), where we have portrayed
German history, especially of the Middle Ages, purposely ignoring
the law of previous accumulation in all its forms, even in that
of the Malthusian law of population, and have reached new views.
The book has never till this day (it appeared first in 1898) been
criticized by an expert; there is only a private, very
appreciative statement by Karl Lamprecht (printed in the preface
to the second edition). If strength and life hold out, my
co-worker, Fedor Schneider, and I will complete in the fourth
volume of Das System der Soziologie, which we have
undertaken, a delineation of the social and economic history of
Europe from the tribal migrations to the present, handling this
great theme without the use of the false explanations of the law
of previous accumulation, that is, proceeding from the principle
of the "sociological idea of the state."

The Limitations of Method

This first attempt on a large scale will have to show what
sociological history-writing, which has already proved itself in
the field of mental history, can do in that of political history.
But here it must be said that it is not in a position to
accomplish, and is neither willing nor obligated to accomplish,
what some of its opponents demand of it - the setting up of
mathematically exact "laws of nature" for history. That
is a ridiculous demand of us which proves nothing more than that
the originators of it have little notion of the conception of a
law, that they confuse a limited class with the main concept.
Only in mathematical physics, for example, in astronomy, are
there laws of this precision; the other natural sciences have to
get along with laws of much lesser range, and often [p. 232]
enough even with mere empirical rules. One cannot demand of
sociology, which has to do with even more complicated aggregates,
any greater precision than, for instance, of meteorology. We have
expatiated on this subject in our Allgemeine Soziologie to
a considerable extent, namely, in connection with Cournot and
Eulenburg, and will only refer to that discussion now.

In the second place, it is to be noted at the outset that
sociology, conceived in its modern significance as the purely
causal science of the social process, is not in a position by
itself to illuminate history-writing completely. It needs on
every hand the co-operation of social philosophy, that is to say,
ethics, which is oriented in values and itself assigns values.

And thirdly, it must be said that sociological
history-writing, as an inductive theoretical science, is for this
very reason not in a position to do justice to the purely
individual, for the reason that no single theoretical science can
do this, since it reasons away from the individual. It must
therefore decline to reveal the secret of the so-called
supersocial personality - the great leader, scholar, saint, and
so forth. Here there still remains for the real, individualizing
writing of history a wide field of activity in which it will
likewise have to work in common with social philosophy.

But even here, too, sociological history-writing has
indispensable preparatory work to do. For it is scarcely ever
disputed and nowadays is regarded as proved, that even the
strongest, the most ingenious, individual is and remains deeply
entangled in the standards of his group. He towers, at times very
high, above his fellows, but he never stands outside their
intellectual circle. Only comparative inductive generalization
can ascertain, even in the case of the greatest personalities,
how large the individual scope is within which they are able to
emancipate themselves from their group imperatives. Until this
general conformity to law is determined, every evaluation of the
historical personality is purely arbitrary and not in the least
binding. Only the lack of such general, sociological preparatory
researches has made possible the absolutely ridiculous
overvaluation of the "great men" which reached its
highest point in Treitschke and degenerated in Carlyle
(hero-worship) into a Messianic cult, which annuls the usual
great-men theory since it recognizes in the whole course of the
world's history only a very small number of geniuses.

That is about all that is to be said about the relation of
history-writing [p. 233]
and sociology to-day. The practical application is that the
sociologist, in whatever part of this great field he may choose
to work, should take the most sincere pains to become acquainted
with his own personal equation and properly to take it into
account. Only then will the so-called mental sciences begin to be
sciences in the real, strict sense of the word. Only when this is
done, will sociology be able to attain its highest goal of
becoming the schoolmaster of man, who will never rise from the
pitiful barbarism in which he is living until he has learned by
unprejudiced science to master the most powerful of all
elementary processes, the social process, with as much surety as
he controls steam and electricity to-day. Nothing is so
practical as theory. And never did a time need a correct
social theory more than does our day - this world of the white
man which threatens to go under in the collision of Western
Capitalism and Eastern Bolshevism.

By "progress" we understand,
leaving aside every other connotation connected with the
word, solely the changes of the social process - or what
amounts to the same thing, human society - taking place
in the dimensions of time. For example, a clear
retrogression, such as "a cultural loss," may
according to our definition be a part of progress.